At some point, people stopped playing the same game.

And that’s fine. It’s the principle that underpins the game and drives the behaviour. Poker as a game is fun in itself, but there’s a clear difference between playing for money and playing for just enjoyment. Poker is an adversarial game, so players have always sought an edge on each other. The question, for the operators that host the games, is which edges to allow and at what point they unbalance the whole ecosystem.

If you want to see where that question led, watch Jonathan Tamayo’s repeated excursions to the rail at the 2024 WSOP main event to check with a solver whether he’d played the hand correctly in all-in situations. There are any number of angles to it (and plenty of people commented at the time), but the one that matters here is the perception it gives of the game. Imagine Tiger Woods hitting a key drive at the end of the Masters and then immediately running over to a Trackman to check spin rates, launch angles and whatever else. To the casual viewer, it would look weird and otherworldly. But that’s what poker evolved into.

Where we are now is the predictable end of a trend that started well over a decade ago. It comes from how poker players think and how the sites make money. When online poker came along, new tools and approaches became possible. Mass multi-tabling with a strict mathematical approach became a viable route to the top VIP tiers. Heads-up displays, third-party databases that aggregated player behaviour, and increasingly sophisticated training sites gave players who knew how to use them an advantage against opponents they’d never played before. If you ever saw the screen of a top online player it would be unrecognisable next to the base setup, and new players, and people who were losing, notice when they appear to be playing a different game. Now we have complex solvers that can identify optimal actions in most situations, and poker theory is massively more detailed and comprehensive. The game evolved like chess, but with a monetary incentive to exploit disparities, and no Elo system to make them visible.

PokerStars used to struggle with how to handle this. I remember any number of group meetings, including some with Isai, about whichever tool had crossed the boundary of what was considered acceptable. Stars could have killed the entire third-party ecosystem by randomising table names, for instance, but doing so would have run straight into the tension I described in Not neutral. The players who put in the most money quite liked the advantage these tools gave them. They also generally fell under the category of skill tools, and the sites were quite fond of the notion that poker is a game of skill.

So you ended up with an uneasy truce that persists to this day. Each individual decision to permit third-party tools was defensible in isolation, but in aggregate they optimised the product around one cohort - the same cohort the people designing the product had mostly come from. The tooling around prediction markets is on a similar arc, if not at an even higher level of technical complexity. PMs today are roughly where poker was at the beginning of the boom years, and the operators are making the same choices about what to permit, with arguably more incentive to support the most sophisticated and well-resourced participants.

Not long after that meeting in the pub, I found it was possible to be pretty successful in online poker just by dint of having read a Sklansky book, being moderately disciplined on starting hands, and being able to count fingers on both hands. It was a great time to be a player. Many of the people who yearn for the return of those days misunderstand what was actually happening, and why that period can never be repeated. Compare it to someone early in their poker journey today. A few weeks ago I was looking through a tournament course from one of the popular learning sites and compared to Sklansky-era thinking, it’s on another planet. Starting hand ranges. Nut and range advantages. How to play in almost all core scenarios across any street. Strategies for the decisive moments. The learning curve is vastly steeper, as is the depth of detail, but it’s probably table stakes for even having a chance these days. The same material would have made you almost unstoppable fifteen years ago.

Poker (the business) has always been about finding a balance along multiple, sometimes competing dimensions. One of its advantages over other verticals is that the game obscures the gap between players for a while, but it doesn’t do so for long. When the ecosystem supporting the dedicated and detail-oriented took an enormous leap forward, the gap between the averagely competent and the new player became a chasm.

The prevailing narrative in the industry has always separated the ‘recreational’ player from the ‘pro’, but most of the people who use the term ‘recreational’ or ‘casual’ wouldn’t recognise the perspective of such a player even if it were spelled out for them. Those players don’t need to lose money to leave. They just need to look at the game, and the vibe around it, and conclude it isn’t for them. A new player today, looking at the complexity of the solvers, the HUDs and the learning materials, would reasonably think they were at a massive disadvantage and had to go back to college to have a chance. That’s the opposite of the emotional resonance that things like the Moneymaker victory tapped into.

That’s really what it comes down to. Do people think they have a chance? The Jonathan Tamayos of the world definitely do. But what about the people at the base of the pyramid who support them? What about the people who just want to have fun?

Philip Atkinson, CEO, May 2026